News Of The Weird - Dec. 31, 2002

Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.

News of the Weird has reported several times on men either killed or injured falling down embankments at night after stopping their vehicles on the side of the road to seek a secluded place to urinate. In September, Rick Schultz, 34, and James Esposti, 21, were taken to Punxsutawney (Pa.) Hospital after being knocked down when their Ford Ranger truck coasted backward into them while they were urinating at the side of a road.

The art of protest by sewing one’s lips together is apparently becoming more popular. A 34-year-old man in Estonia, facing a charge of setting a Mercedes-Benz on fire, showed up in court with stitched lips in May.

And in June, 50 refugees, held at the Woomera detention center in Australia, sewed their lips shut to emphasize their hunger strike as they lobbied for asylum.

And a 39-year-old man from Iraq with bright red stitching on his lips was picked up by police from a city square in Zurich, Switzerland, in September (but he was unable to tell police what he was protesting, if anything).

A 1999 New England Journal of Medicine article warned that even putting a dead rattlesnake’s head in your mouth can be fatal, and News of the Weird has run stories of men cuddling their pet rattlesnakes, particularly in conjunction with alcohol use. In November, Matthew George, 21, of Yacolt, Wash., was hospitalized in serious condition after the rattlesnake he was kissing bit him on the lip. Apparently, George was proudly showing to a friend the snake that he had found in the Arizona desert in October. Snake expert Richard Ritchey, asked by a reporter for The Oregonian whose fault the incident was (George’s or the snake’s), answered, “The one with the bigger brain,” but he did not say which one he thought that was.
Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or [email protected]
Copyright © 2001 by Chuck Shepherd

NEWS OF THE WEIRD